Knock Them All out of the Park – B+W Engineering and Design Blog

I am here once again. I don’t want to be here. We do not promise anything that isn’t possible to accomplish. When I hear a client say we need this now, I have to think is this actually possible to do? And then I think if I could hire anyone worth their salt in large numbers would this be possible to do? And then my basic math skills say no. Not so much as a no, but something more like we pride ourselves on buildable plans, and well the answer would be a less than a no. I will never over promise a project.

So why do I say that in a heading2 for this blog? We don’t promise the impossible. I am still a sucker for this business and most of the time we knock our projects out of the park. But there are other projects that aren’t so easy. That sounds so simple right? Its not. Projects have to go through certain cities that are easy or very difficult. I will or will not call out those cities in the future depending on what their comments are in the future. I know a specific South Bay City might be requiring a lot more info to get a plan approved. So much extra work, in fact that at this point we may not take anymore work there. Because no one will believe us for what they want us to submit. I can”t even believe it and it is ridiculous. With our last plan going into the 2nd submittal we will see where that goes. I will call everyone out though on this one, as if it continues the plan checks are completely awful, and too many degrees over the top. We have a few jobs hanging around there, so we have a really good idea of what they are asking.

Another City we are working in has been amazing. Thank you. When this project starts to get built shortly I will talk more about it. I have heard other Civil Engineers or other consultants say this particular City is very hard to get plans approved in. I don’t see it. This particular plan checker is fair. He takes a scale to your plans with a calculator. Sounds good to me. And what do you know we were about to get approved. And then the trouble started happening. This has nothing to do with anything. Its one of those these guys might have missed it, but now they see it types of things. I can’t blame them for what is being caught. And yet we still have our plan checker going to great lengths, along with the City Engineer, to help us out. Its really not that bad.

And that”s the issue. We have a City who is known to be very difficult to approve Civil Engineering plans in. And they are going through great lengths to have the plans approved. I am calling out cities and agreeing with what’s going on here. I like that our plan checker brings out the scale and calculator to verify our plans. That’s what should be happening. A few paragraphs up, I think that plan checker wants us to have multiple documents verifying what is on one single plan sheet. There is a difference for verifying a plan and just having us prove something multiple times through multiple reports and calculations that could be summed up in everything already shown on the plans. As I type that out, word are at a loss. How can I explain this to anyone else? Completely terrible.

So how are we knocking anything out of the park after I type any of that story? One of our clients who knows his project is going through some weird ordeal with LA City is about to finally get their grading plans approved. We have a lot of projects in plan check right now as well in many different cities. At least I can say that El Segundo has some strict plan checks but they are fair. Want to guess where one of our apartment projects is located, and is sitting in the queue? LA City is the best city to get any plans through. If you want to build in LA City proper, go for it. They are still strict but extremely reasonable. And LA City is exactly why we had one year of projects getting approved in one go around.

With a few of our Civil Engineering projects still hanging around, I am still awake right now stressing out. What other company has their owner posting at about 4AM about their feelings on the matter? And yes we were about to get a large project approved and there were some major changes. The funny thing is how that normally works, tying majors changes into an existing design is harder than starting from scratch. Which is something I saw earlier. I deleted a large chunk of the project and started over. That helps when designing, so you don’t get stuck. Blow it all out and start over.

B+W Engineering is going through some interesting times. Most of our clients are timing the market. Other clients have some oddball goals that they must hit. If that is all wrapped together you have me posting, with no sleep. And its almost time to wake up.

The post Knock Them All out of the Park appeared first on B+W Engineering and Design Blog.